Dr Jess Elmer

Jess has over 12 years of experience in working with children, young people and families within a range of NHS community, clinic and inpatient settings. Jess is passionate about getting alongside families to work in creative and engaging ways. At the heart of her approach she seeks to understand a person within the context of their life experiences, relationships, community, culture and social context. She believes it’s important not to define someone by the problems they experience and seeks to learn about a person’s strengths, interests and resources so that these can be bought in to therapy. 

Jess works with children and families to develop a shared formulation of the difficulties that they are seeking help for. From this understanding of the problem she considers the evidence base around what is helpful for particular difficulties to inform the intervention approach. 

Jess’s practice is strongly influenced by a wide range of theory, including, Developmental Psychology, Attachment Theory, and Systemic Theory. Jess works in an integrative way to meet the needs of the person/family she is working with and uses a range of models to guide her practice. These include, Narrative Therapy, Mindfulness, Mentalisation Based Approaches, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and Systemic Family Therapy. Jess is experienced in offering individual and group based parenting interventions and is an accredited ‘Video feedback to Promote Positive Parenting' (VIPP) intervener and supervisor.   

Jess has been working in the Child and Family Department at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust for eight years and is a Team Manager for The Whole Family Team with Perinatal Specialism which is a specialist under 5s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS). She is responsible for supervising other Psychologists.